Pollution Standards, Costly Monitoring and Fines

Abstract

We investigate the features of optimal regulatory policies composed of pollution standards and probabilities of inspection, where fines for non-compliance depend not only on the degree of violation but alson on nongravity factors.We show that optimal policies can induce either compliance or noncompliance with the standards, the latter being more plausible when monitoring costs are large and, surprisingly, when gravity-based fines are large.Also, both tghe convexity of the sanctions and the level of the non-gravity-based penalties play a key role as to whether optimal policies induce noncompliance.standards;monitoring;convex fines;gravity-based sanctions;non gravity-based sanctions;noncompliance